A Conservative Reappraisal

Is the right becoming reconciled to Obama?

Or beyond that, taking a shine to the guy?

Are pundits thinking that, after a campaign in which he was called a socialist and closet Muslim who hangs around with America-hating preachers, the president-elect's really not so bad?

I suspect that may be the case.

Now maybe the conservative columnists simply misjudged Barack Obama. Maybe they were just being loyal to the McCain (but not necessarily the Palin) side.

Or maybe they're pleasantly surprised that he hasn't named any wild-eyed left-wing radicals. That, in fact, he has appointed top-level folks whom conservatives see as solid and centrist, including Hillary, whom they view as something of a hawk.

Granted, this may not last. The last time I checked, the man the media now treat as president hasn't taken office yet. He hasn't made policy decisions that are going to tick off folks on the left as well as the right. Maybe down the road it will be remembered as the briefest of interregnums.

But Obama must be doing something right. At a minimum, he seems to be avoiding as the clumsiness of the Clinton transition. Of course, the severity of the financial crisis helps him in a political sense (though not in a real-world sense, since it greatly limits his ability to fashion any domestic agenda other than trying to create jobs). People are willing to give him some latitude in the hope that he can dig us out of the enormous hole left by the outgoing president. I mean, is he going to become a liberal nut and attempt something like nationalizing the banks? Oh right.

So the conservatives may be only temporarily mollified, but that's not nothing.

Andrew Sullivan is struck by "the sudden, if tempered, swooning of the center-right for Obama. even Fred Barnes has had an epiphany of sorts. They are responding to his obviously sensible and accomplished picks for the economy and foreign affairs as if they have realized for the first time who "that one" actually is. He is not now and never has been a leftist ideologue. That was a paranoid fantasy that helped kill the GOP this year. He is a pragmatic, sane, reasoned centrist liberal. He doesn't want to surrender to terror or abolish capitalism -- he wants to hone our fight against the Islamists to better effect and to save capitalism from itself. And the core meaning of his candidacy -- an end to the polarizing culture war battles of the post-Vietnam era -- is not just hype. It's real."

I'm sure Obama means to do that. Whether he can accomplish it in a place like Washington is a whole other question.

The aforementioned Fred Barnes, in the Weekly Standard, is surprised by the path Obama is choosing: